Small steps

Today, it was a lick&stick tattoo on my ankle and next, I think it will be the Pilates class I haven't been to since the end of May. The ladies all know and The Jr Girl and ACIL (Amazing Cousin-in-Law) will come if I need them (or they need it). I will follow (or preced) class with going back to the crematorium to finish up paper work and provide my daily dose of unreality. Their theme funeral set-ups include a golfing one complete with the inside of the casket lined with astroturf and the biggest collection of artificial flowers outside of a Shmichaels or (late, somewhat lamented) Shlewiscraft. Death is not the end - those flowers will outlast eternity.

Y'day, it was offloading 4 boxes of wine bottles we never used to a neighbour who makes yummy raspberry wine (very good with soda and ice) and an evening walk with friends who are getting used to new hiking boots. And The Jrs raked about half a ton of pine needles and other burnables from under our walkway. Have I mentioned that we live in an "interface area" which means that during long hot dry summers I fill up a couple of bankers' boxes with essential papers and treasures and leave them by the back door "in case" of a fire evacuation notice.

Odd how some people (often the unlikely ones) are exactly what we need right now and others (the expected steppers-up) just don't fit with the new reality. I am learning how much I was projecting my own stuff on other people and that my stuff is different now. I am choosing whose needs/wants I am willing to meet these days instead of doing my automatic "yes" - mostly, I'm choosing to meet my and my children's needs and then the line is drawn.

When my brother died, there were raptors almost daily through that long Spring. Last night, up the hill, there was a falcon and then a hawk swinging on the air. Grazie.

33 years, 15 days....

When I started this blogging adventure, it was because The Sr Boy et moi were going on separate journeys at the same time. He was riding a Moto Guzzi with another friend from London to the pyramids through Europe, Tunisia, Libya to Egypt and back through Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, and the rest of Europe. I was hanging out in France-Italy-Switzerland-France. We were to meet either at LHW or YVR at the end of an almost three month separation. As things worked/played out, we met a week early - the day after my b'day and had a week in England getting used to being together again. As usual, there were a few re-connect bumps but generally a good time was had by both of us despite the differences of our journeys. It was the longest we had been apart since we had met.

We had been together for almost 33 years. He had arrived, tanned and blue-eyed, at a baseball game on a motorcycle. A week and a half ago, he left, tanned and blue-eyed, 33 years and 15 days later, gone from complications of a motorcycle accident.

We are going to be apart far longer than last fall's adventure

and there is no option of re-connect, no option of cutting and pasting his adventures into this writing, no more, no more.....